Sor Juana and Nicholas of Cusa

Abstract

Without evaluating the extraordinary and consistent impression that Nicholas of Cusa exerted on the works by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, it would be hardly possible to achieve a profound comprehension of one of the most prominent women writers of the Latin American Baroque period. The Cusan’s legacy provided Sor Juana with the symbol of the opposing pyramids of light and shadow, and with the metaphor of the circle and the center, already sifted by the Spanish mystics. Both symbols in her poem The Dream inscribe within a Renaissance change of episteme, in which a mathematical and optical version of the ideas was always produced through the elucidation of oneself, of the individual as part of a cyclic, spherical universe in which a central, all-seeing eye is described in various works by Nicholas of Cusa. The idea of divine contemplation with our bodily eyes closed, for the incorporeal is only accessible by getting rid of the corporeal; the mathematical and geometrical speculations about divinity and the conceptions of the world as a combination of signs; how the infinite and the finite encounter and the knowledge of the world is always a probability and a conjecture, all these are philosophical traces which enlighten The Dream, one of the most captivating intellectual poems in Spanish literature.

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